Walls
by AllyBallyBee
Summary: Time to let the walls fall down.


Disclaimer: I don't own nothing. That's right, a double negative so now you know I'm serious!

A/N: I was watching a video by 'forbiddenspark' on youtube to the song 'Gravity' and I liked the idea so much that I thought I would put her images to words. I therefore owe her this story.

"You'd die for Mulder but you won't allow yourself to love him"

Part of her wished that he was wrong, that he didn't know anything about her and Mulder. She wished that his words meant nothing, that they were so inconsequential that they made little to no impact on her.

Yet, it appeared that Cigarette Smoking Man knew more about her heart than she did; knew the weakness that was her devotion to Mulder.

***

She had always known she was strong. Strong-willed, strong-minded, strongly opinionated. It was how she had been taught to be from the very beginning.

"Always be strong, Dana. It makes it harder for them to break you"

At the age of nine, she had had little understanding of what her father meant by 'break'. At first, she had thought he had meant her physical body; assumed he had wanted her to fight back when she was being bullied.

The look of disappointment she had received when she had come home after hitting a boy in the school yard who dared to call her an idiot told her that it wasn't what he had meant.

And though he had always showered her with praise when she had brought home her straight-A report card, she somehow sensed that intelligence was another thing that he had not classed as being 'strong'. Her ability to ace every test was something that she doubted could be broken.

Then she had gone to college, met Colin in her Advanced Biology class, and he had broken her heart. And when she had come home from college for the holidays, her eyes betraying the stoic front she had created, her father had looked at her and said simply "Remember what I said? Don't let them break you".

Finally realising what her father had meant all those years before, she had been determined that she would follow his advice; promising herself that no other man would make her heart ache the way Colin had.

And she hadn't. Not until a young, battered and tortured FBI Agent had touched his palm to her cheek and she had let the world fade away to nothing.

She had let her walls fall down for a second and it had scared her into building more. As she sat on her couch that night she had forced herself to believe that no man was worth the pain of being broken. And so she had held Mulder at the distance that she thought would be pertinent to maintaining her shield.

After her father passed away, she hoped that her strength continued to make him proud; hoped that he looked down on her and felt satisfied enough to call her his daughter.

Then Padgett had torn though her barriers, describing her life, her emotions, her...soul...in infinitely minute detail and it had seemed that she would never be able to re-build the walls against further intrusion. That had almost broken her.

Yet, when she had regained consciousness, terrified into believing that a stranger's hand was buried deep within her chest, Mulder's presence had offered a comfort that she had seldom let herself accept.

She wasn't sure what had hurt more: Padgett's intrusion into the innermost workings of her life; the hooded man's assault on her body; or the safety that Mulder's arms had provided her and that she was almost unwilling to give up once her tears had dried.

She knew that it was becoming harder and harder to maintain her distance from Mulder. Had known it for a while before Padgett's novel had taken part of her. And she didn't know what to do about it.

Didn't think she was ready to fall; to be broken; to give up her strength.

***

He was right. She had denied herself the possibility of Mulder's affection. And if she was truthful, her father's warning had done little more than given her an excuse for holding Mulder forever at an arm's length. It had provided her with a reason to prioritise her partnership with him over a chance of anything else.

But she had lived for so long at an arm's length from everyone that she didn't know how to change it. She had spent such a lot of her life building walls that bringing them down seemed like an impossible, almost insurmountable, task.

Not only that, the prospect of letting someone in scared her beyond what she could even admit to herself.

And yet, she knew that her father had never wished for her to be alone; knew that he would have wanted her to let the one person in that would make her happy.

Perhaps it was time for gravity to start helping her knock the walls down.

***


End file.
